Secret cars for the government

On February 2, the Special Purpose Garage Museum at VDNKh opened a unique exhibition dedicated to the 100-year history of secret car design for the leaders of the Soviet state and modern Russia.

There is such a popular joke phrase: a car is not a luxury, but a means of transportation. For us, and for the first person of the country, this is not only a means of transportation for the head of state, but also an integral part of solemn ceremonies and parades, the embodiment of the strength and power of the country, a subject of special pride and prestige.

It is clear that cars for the president are not bought in the salon, the design work on the creation of government limousines is carried out very seriously and is always carefully hidden from prying eyes. But the exhibition “Design classified as “secret”” at the Special Purpose Garage Museum at VDNKh will help us reveal the secret. This is the fruit of many months of painstaking work in archives, museum storerooms, private collections and closed research institutes, the result of trips around the country and many hours of conversations with designers and designers.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to see real developments – they remain behind closed doors and in folders classified as “secret”, but visitors will be able to get acquainted with sketches, sketches and search options for the country’s main car. Much of what could pass through the streets of the capital has been preserved in drawings, photographs and large-scale models. The time has come to collect, comprehend and show all this, the organizers of the exhibition “Design classified as “secret”” decided. A team of talented journalists and young historians has created a unique exhibition project that includes hundreds of sketches and rare photographs, as well as wooden and plasticine prototypes of limousines, the existence of which most of us did not even know existed.

“It turned out to be an exhibition of “machines of power that did not exist,” notes the curator of the exhibition, collector and gallery owner Ilya Sorokin, “before the car leaves the gates of the factory, a lot of design and engineering work is carried out, a lot of sketches that go nowhere. They go to the basket. Something comes to plasticine models 1:10, 1:5, then even 1:1. As a rule, then this plasticine goes to the next layouts of the following developments. As a rule, rarely that is saved. This is if we are talking about ordinary cars. If we are talking about the cars of the first persons, then all this is also classified as “secret”. And no one will ever allow you to see what the cars are made of, which we then see on the streets that the leaders of the country drive. Looking over the shoulder of a designer who creates a first-person car is like looking at a draft of the national anthem. It’s absolutely impossible. Therefore, the exhibition that we are opening, it could not take place in any museum. Only at the Special Purpose Garage Museum. Here are objects that will one day be shown, and it is not known if we will be able to see them again or if they will return to their special storages.

At different times, the most eminent Soviet automobile artists – Valentin Rostkov, Yuri Dolmatovsky, Vladimir Aryamov, Eric Sabo, Eduard Molchanov – offered their vision of the country’s main car at different times. Almost all of their projects did not see the light, and remained on paper. Until recently, only single drawings by these artists were known. Occasionally, they were published in books and magazines, flashed on the Internet, and were shown in museums. And only now at the exhibition it will be possible to truly appreciate the breadth of the scope of this phenomenon.

For the first time, the search and alternative projects of the flagships of the domestic auto industry will be presented to the public. None of the design ideas presented at the exhibition came to life. Cars in the drawings, and finished prototypes that were considered unsuccessful, and just search solutions – the trouble for many of them is that they were way ahead of their time.

Many of the ideas are striking grandiosity and fantasy. Back in the 1940s, a group of young designers and artists of the Stalin Moscow Automobile Plant developed a project for an absolutely unrealistic “space” limousine that seemed like an alien from the future, but the war prevented further work.

After the war, the twenty-year-old artist Vladimir Aryamov drew even more futuristic Moskva cars for himself, and he did not count on bringing the drawings to life. It was a dream in its purest form – a fantasy of what the main car of the Soviet Union could look like. In the 1960s, he also painted unusual and amazingly beautiful cabriolets with the telling name “Mir”, intended for solemn meetings of the leaders of the superpowers.

In the 60s, the talented artist Eric Szabo proposed a unique and extraordinary design of government ZILs – all this also did not materialize, disappearing for a long time in the master’s personal archive.

For the first time, the general public was shown search and alternative projects of the flagships of the domestic automobile industry, covering the period from 1922 to 2022 and in many ways ahead of their time. The exhibition presents about 500 sketches, 23 models of car prototypes in different scales, as well as unique exhibits. The first domestic limousine “Leningrad-1” was presented, which was produced at the Krasny Putilovets plant. The first six cars drove through Leningrad on May 1, 1933 during a demonstration. The plans of the plant were to assemble 60 such machines by the end of the year, and in total – 20 thousand. But Stalin personally decided not to allocate 2.6 million rubles for the restructuring of the plant’s tractor workshop, as agricultural equipment was more needed. As a result, all projects for the domestic limousine were transferred to the Stalin plant – the same ZIS. By the way, despite the alleged high status of Leningrad-1, even a short passenger is uncomfortable to sit in it, even in VIP seats.

Particular attention is paid to competitive works for the creation of the flagship of the domestic auto industry – the representative brand “Aurus”. More than 120 projects from around the world were submitted to the open competition “Cortege for the President”. The winning concept participated in a professional competition held by NAMI, as a result of which the appearance of the modern presidential “Aurus” was born. As the director of the NAMI Style Center, the chief designer and head of the team that created the look of all the cars of the AURUS family, Yuri Chernenko, explained, the ZIS-110 was taken as the basis. That is why the car has such a high grille. But then, after technical improvements, since modern engines require more air, the grille had to be expanded. Therefore, outwardly, the car began to resemble Rolls-Royce. But at the core is our VMS. It is from the ZIS-110 that the “pedigree” of all domestic government limousines, including the ZIL-4102, comes. In 1988, two prototypes of this machine of different shades were built. The dark version was unofficially dubbed “Misha”, and the light one – “Paradise”, in honor of Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife. Cars had to be with a monocoque body, independent rear suspension. In the cabin, even then, a computer system was supposed to read and play data, and instead of a cassette recorder, a CD player. But this project failed to materialize. Perestroika began, and factories were left without money for the production of luxury cars. By the way, of the two prototypes, only the Paradise presented at the exhibition survived, the Misha was completely destroyed.

In addition, visitors will see diploma works by young contemporary designers trying to rethink lost legendary brands such as ZIL, Chaika and Russo-Balt. These projects, like the drawings of designers of the distant 20s and 40s, also look unusual, sometimes incomprehensible, controversial, outrageous and unrealistic. Who knows, maybe in the future the first persons of the country will cut through the space precisely on such fantastic structures?

The exhibition runs from February 2 to April 16.

Mikhail Kovalyov.

Author’s photo